03/01/2018
Supreme Court confirms controversial Forest Act
Ruling puts Brazil’s indigenous peoples in mortal danger (Press Release)
The Supreme Court’s ruling puts Brazil’s indigenous peoples in mortal danger, as it opens the door to the destruction of their livelihoods. Photo: Ben Sutherland via Flickr
The Society for Threatened Peoples (STP) is shocked that the Supreme Court of Brazil rejected a revision of the 2012 Forest Act on Thursday. “This is a black day for the more than 305 indigenous peoples of Brazil and the approximately 100 indigenous communities living in voluntary seclusion. The amnesty provision for illegal logging before 2008 and the reduced penalties for other forest clearances will remain. The lawbreakers are rewarded, and this will encourage further forest exploitation,” criticized Yvonne Bangert, the STP’s expert on questions regarding indigenous peoples, in Göttingen on Thursday.
“The Supreme Court’s ruling puts Brazil’s indigenous peoples in mortal danger, as it opens the door to the destruction of their livelihoods,” Bangert criticized. The ruling is a success for the agrarian lobby, for which the protection of indigenous Amazon rainforest is an obstacle in the search for more and more acreage – to be used as soybean plantations or cattle pastures, for example. Now, we fear that it will hardly be possible to stop other legislative proposals that undermine the protection of existing and the creation of new protected areas for the indigenous peoples.
Thus, law PEC 215 aims to put the parliament – in which the agricultural lobby is strongly represented – in charge of decisions on the recognition of protected areas for indigenous peoples. “Indigenous human rights activists fear that there will be no further protected areas and no more new application procedures,” Bangert stated. “But own land is indispensable for indigenous communities.”
Further, there could be new initiatives to allow the exploitation of natural resources in existing protected areas – especially based on law PEC 65, according to which the usual three-stage environmental assessment procedure for new projects will be replaced by a single-stage verification procedure, which can even be carried out by the interested construction company itself.
Header Photo: Ben Sutherland via Flickr
